FRIDUGIS, frî” ü” zhî’ (FREDEGISUS, FRIDUGISUS, FREDEGIS, FREDUGIS): French ecclesiastic and statesman; b. in England in the second half of the eighth century; d. in France 834. He left his native country for France some time before 796 and became a favorite pupil of Alcuin. He was a deacon at the French court in that year, and four years later had become archdeacon and teacher at the academy. After the death of Alcuin in 804, Charlemagne appointed Fridugis abbot of St. Martin's in Tours, later giving him the monasteries of St. Omer and St. Berlin. From 819 to 832 he was chancellor of Louis the Pious, in which office he made a number of praiseworthy innovations, but his career as an abbot was less creditable. Fridugis was the author of an Epistola ad proceres, in which he discusses light and darkness as positive entities, not as abstract negations. He likewise wrote another work which is lost, although its contents are known from Agobard's Liber contra objectiones Fredegesi, which states that in it Fridugis maintained the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of Scripture.